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rikatix posted:The Irish are usually my best euro tippers. Actually I would say they are the best. French and Spanish the worst. Australians and New Zealanders are pretty solid tippers as well. I see a lot more of them as I'm closer to the west coast than east. Curious if nrr has similar opinions, given he's right on the coast.
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Nov 12, 2012 01:47
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rikatix posted:Just ranting: How dare they not know which fancy wine to choose and simply assume you have a standard house to serve for those occasions. I wouldn't have tipped you a penny. My best tipper is this Irish guy who has a golden touch with betting. My pub is right next door to a willy hill so he's always in and out on match or race day and if it goes well (which it usually does) he gets rounds for everyone "and have a few for yersel' pal". Otherwise it's usually the football crowd (casuals) who see the bar as part of "their area" so they like to "take care of it". Which means leaving me with like 7 drat pints of Kronenbourg on tap for when my shift ends. Bonus points if you manage to persuade them to try some new concoction they've never heard of. "A Blackbeard? Fit's that?" "Half pint Guinness, shot of Morgans and topped up wi' coke." "Sounds gads (slang for disgusting). Ah'll hae three fer the lads! Keep the change." Coohoolin fucked around with this message at 01:56 on Nov 12, 2012 |
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Nov 12, 2012 01:51
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Sorry, but it seems like you're complaining about the poor way you handled things that every waiter ever deals with all the time. To be frank with you I could have dealt with every single one of the problems you mentioned without missing a beat. It's completely second nature to make a suggestion to a customer if they're not being specific. Here's how it seems like that beer conversation went: "A beer in a straight glass" "What beer would you like?" "Whatever, any beer" "We have 32 different bottled varieties here sir" "Just bring a beer, I don't care" So you walked off and brought nothing. They can be snippy and non-responsive sure, but in terms of the end goal of getting an order from them you were a bigger problem than them. You also can't be openly rude to a customers face and then complain about not getting tipped, it's one or the other. Hoops fucked around with this message at 02:06 on Nov 12, 2012 |
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Nov 12, 2012 02:03
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Hoops posted:
Gotta agree with this. I have had occasion to decide that a customer has pissed me off beyond my ability to give a gently caress and proceeded to make them know that they are bad people, but if they then don't tip or complain about me, well, I kind of expected that when I told them "If you don't snapping your loving fingers at me, you're going to die of thirst, cupcake."
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Nov 12, 2012 04:24
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Is there ever a time where it's acceptable to do the 'Hey, I'm a bartender' thing? I ask, because I was out at a joint tonight. I'd done most of my drinking earlier at another joint and was just wanting to chill for a while, so I ordered a Red Bull, which at this place is $4.50. I hand her a $20 and she gives me back two quarters, a $5 and a $10. I ask if she could give me some coins with the five and she goes "Oh, it's just a Red Bull, hon. Don't worry about it." I wanted to tell her that I'd never had a bartender turn away a tip and that it's always a good idea to give some coin back and I wanted to tip her as a loving courtesy because it was dead (about a 900 occupancy joint that had maybe 100 people in it at midnight on a long weekend.) I didn't, though, because if you're going to be that stupid, gently caress yourself.
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Nov 12, 2012 09:59
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I was just wanting to chill for a while, so I ordered a Red Bull,
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Nov 12, 2012 10:14
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nrr posted:I was just wanting to chill for a while, so I ordered a Red Bull, I was popping in to say hi to a friend who was supposedly working, she wasn't, so I hung around for another 20, then hosed off home. Unless you're talking about drinking a Red Bull to 'chill', then, yeah, I'm a dummy, as I'm still awake!
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Nov 12, 2012 14:25
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Perdido posted:I wanted to tell her that I'd never had a bartender turn away a tip and that it's always a good idea to give some coin back and I wanted to tip her as a loving courtesy because it was dead (about a 900 occupancy joint that had maybe 100 people in it at midnight on a long weekend.) I didn't, though, because if you're going to be that stupid, gently caress yourself. ? I've turned down tips if the customer ordered something they could have bought from a vending machine or if I thought they were being overly generous, especially for first time orders. It's weird accepting gratuities when the only difference between me and the machine is I open it for you and maybe pour it into a glass for you if you ask, or if the tip is close to or exceeds the value of whatever I just sold. I guess you could extend that to most aspects of a bar especially if you sell a lot of packaged products, but my thinking there is "save your money for more drinking later, because you'll probably be more generous with your tips the more you drink and I won't feel as bad about taking your money for low effort transactions" rather than "I don't need your pittances for such low effort transactions". From the way you described it she maybe could have chosen her words a bit better, though I can understand why she may have said that.
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Nov 12, 2012 17:18
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Weird. I always tip, even if it's for a glass of water. I've never had someone say 'No, that's okay, you don't have to tip me,' ever and was really taken aback by someone saying that. I'd certainly never tell someone not to tip me, although I don't expect people to be tipping me. Maybe it's a Canadian politeness-through-guilt thing or something.
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Nov 12, 2012 18:12
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Perdido posted:Weird. I always tip, even if it's for a glass of water. I've never had someone say 'No, that's okay, you don't have to tip me,' ever and was really taken aback by someone saying that. One more indulgence into the field of tipping: Man, I had 4 different dudes tipping me $1 on each plastic cup of tap water for a solid 2 hours this weekend, and yes, I did at one point openly tell a couple of them that their gratuity on the first glass was noticed, and thanked them. They kept doing it. And they also never waited more than 30 seconds (I imagine) for refills on water.
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Nov 12, 2012 19:46
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Perdido posted:Australians and New Zealanders are pretty solid tippers as well. I see a lot more of them as I'm closer to the west coast than east. All Of the Aussies and Kiwis I've ever served were certifiably insane, in the best way possible, and great tippers.
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Nov 12, 2012 23:01
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Perdido posted:Unless you're talking about drinking a Red Bull to 'chill', then, yeah, I'm a dummy, as I'm still awake! Yeah, caffeine fucks me up to the point of having a red bull at 8-9pm will probably keep me up to 7am or so and the idea of having one to chill is pretty funny. On that tipping thing you asked before, I've had both ends of the spectrum from Aussies and Kiwis. The thing is that the joke on Aussies is that they don't tip, except that's not true at all. The problem is that tipping exists in Australia but it's not mandatory. As a result, Australian's normally tip as a sincere thankyou for great service as opposed to just tipping for any service because you have to. Over here though, that can create grounds for a bit of contention because a lot of us don't see why a guy who just cracked my beer and handed it to me with a scowl on his face deserves a tip for good service. The bartender obviously gets pissed when he gets no tip, and the whole cycle continues because "loving Aussies never tip," and so why should he bother giving them good service? On the flip side, I've had Americans come up here to Canada and think they don't have to tip, or at least not as much, just because they're not at home anymore. It's kind of weird the way these things work out sometimes. tl;dr: basically, look after your Aussie's and they'll usually look after you. Give them nothing special and you'll likely see nothing special.
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Nov 12, 2012 23:18
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FaceEater posted:One more indulgence into the field of tipping: Man, I had 4 different dudes tipping me $1 on each plastic cup of tap water for a solid 2 hours this weekend, and yes, I did at one point openly tell a couple of them that their gratuity on the first glass was noticed, and thanked them. Not a tipping comment, but my pet peeve are people who try to usurp the whole waiting process with "I JUST want a glass of WATER!" It's still a drink, I still have to make it, and since it comes out of the guns about a quarter as fast as soda or coke, it takes longer than to make a pair of vodka sodas. Water tippers are, of course, awesome.
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Nov 13, 2012 01:41
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I really want to invent a soda gun that pushes water out as fast or faster than everything else. Not only would I be rich, I would be in the debt of every bartender on the planet and never have to pay for a drink again.
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Nov 13, 2012 09:43
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nrr posted:Yeah, caffeine fucks me up to the point of having a red bull at 8-9pm will probably keep me up to 7am or so and the idea of having one to chill is pretty funny. Yeah, Americans love to pretend to be confused by our 'funny money' and only drop quarters into the tip jar.
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Nov 13, 2012 09:47
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I've had the opposite in the UK... Americans who see coins as worthless so hand me all their coins as well as a fiver as a tip. Rare, but it happens.
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Nov 13, 2012 09:55
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nrr posted:
As an Australian bartender this sounds about right. Our tips at then end of the night range from $2 to $90 (split between 3) depending on how chatty were feeling and if our waitress has her cleavage out. Although if they pay by card theres no chance of getting a tip. But seeing as we get paid $20 an hour, we're not really complaining. I seriously have no idea how being paid like $4/h even became an acceptable thing in your country, its insane. Are there non-tip supplemented jobs that pay such a dismal amount?
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Nov 13, 2012 10:45
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Dirnok posted:I really want to invent a soda gun that pushes water out as fast or faster than everything else. Not only would I be rich, I would be in the debt of every bartender on the planet and never have to pay for a drink again. I like where your head's at!
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Nov 13, 2012 12:10
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Dirnok posted:I really want to invent a soda gun that pushes water out as fast or faster than everything else. Not only would I be rich, I would be in the debt of every bartender on the planet and never have to pay for a drink again. Maybe if you pressurized it, with carbon dioxide? And then the resulting water would have bubbles in it! So I'm doing the open for a new place in two weeks and the fear is finally starting to sink in just as everybody tells me I'm doing a great job, we're getting good press, etc. I know it's just nerves, but oof I'm gonna wake up one day and be like "welp you're a schmuck and everybody knows it, good luck getting another gig in this town" and then give up and go to law school (gently caress that I competed in a Manhattan competition last night, my homie won $1500 and I got lit and a liter of good bourbon, I love my job).
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Nov 13, 2012 15:49
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We have a hybrid system at work, and it's awesome. The soda guns don't do still water, only soda, coke, lemonade, diet coke and tonic. We have these amazing "water guns" though positioned under our bar. You can both fill a glass with them really fast (they have great pressure), or turn a lever the other way and use it to get hot water for cleaning. We call them taps, and I strongly recommend you invest in some!
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Nov 13, 2012 17:36
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Vegetable Melange posted:So I'm doing the open for a new place in two weeks and the fear is finally starting to sink in just as everybody tells me I'm doing a great job, we're getting good press, etc. I know it's just nerves, but oof I'm gonna wake up one day and be like "welp you're a schmuck and everybody knows it, good luck getting another gig in this town" and then give up and go to law school (gently caress that I competed in a Manhattan competition last night, my homie won $1500 and I got lit and a liter of good bourbon, I love my job). Just remember Coughlin's Law.
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Nov 13, 2012 18:28
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Masonity posted:We have a hybrid system at work, and it's awesome. The soda guns don't do still water, only soda, coke, lemonade, diet coke and tonic. We have these amazing "water guns" though positioned under our bar. You can both fill a glass with them really fast (they have great pressure), or turn a lever the other way and use it to get hot water for cleaning. We call them taps, and I strongly recommend you invest in some! Smartass. Sass is what it is.
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Nov 13, 2012 23:27
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So... when it comes to women breaking into the business-- let's just say I have a friend who is easy on the eyes but not a knock-out, so any places looking for gimmicky pretty-girl poo poo is pretty much right out-- what are the pitfalls? Beyond the obvious. I've been considering this as a part-time "side career" for a long time to supplement writing, but I'm almost positive I'll have to lie my way into landing a position (as has so often been suggested)-- I just wanted to know what I'm getting into, and I'm not far enough along in the older thread to have seen if this question already got raised. If so, I'm retarded, if not, tell me things. Sidenote: I was not aware Evan Williams was a thing. I just took for granted that I could sip it with or without a water chaser and not hate my life. I guess it just blended in with he rest of the candidates in the "cheap and not Early Times" category that I never really noticed if it was worse or better than the rest of them. Definitely don't recall disliking it, at least. Might have to give it a try again.
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Nov 14, 2012 00:54
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FaceEater posted:The old thread here: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=2682759 (requires archives! grrrr must've just happened) Bummer, I can't even reopen it to bring it out of archives. If there's anything that should be re posted let me know. Dirnok posted:I really want to invent a soda gun that pushes water out as fast or faster than everything else. Not only would I be rich, I would be in the debt of every bartender on the planet and never have to pay for a drink again. Good God this would be awesome. Doing concerts once or twice a week I spend the last hour of each shift using the gun to fill water pitchers to put on the front bar between filling cups of water for people too drunk/stoned/retarded to see the half dozen pitchers of water and stacks of plastic cups in front of them.
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Nov 14, 2012 01:14
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navyjack posted:Not a tipping comment, but my pet peeve are people who try to usurp the whole waiting process with "I JUST want a glass of WATER!" It's still a drink, I still have to make it, and since it comes out of the guns about a quarter as fast as soda or coke, it takes longer than to make a pair of vodka sodas. Water tippers are, of course, awesome. I get ya. I think I take it for granted that one of the first 5 things I do on my "walk in at 10 PM on a Friday for my shift checklist" is fill up pitchers with ice and water and plastic cups and place them within arm's reach of both drink station and beer faucets. And when THAT nets me tips, it feels almost like stealing. Aka feels good man. James Woods posted:Bummer, I can't even reopen it to bring it out of archives. If there's anything that should be re posted let me know. 1) The links to the posts that you've got in the OP in this new thread, including nrr's contributions and the other couple of links that you had in there to posts and guides and docs and whatnot. Those seem to be the questions that re-appear throughout this thread (like An Old Boot's post above re women in the industry / acquisition of first time bartending jobs) that have been answered and beaten like the contents of a lovely mojito. edit: plus your frickin' stories brah. Required reading. 2) I don't like having water pitchers spilled all over me/the bar/everybody that might be leaning or near the bar at the time by stupid drunk people, so we keep them pitchers away from people generally speaking. Also the space immediately below the bar top on our side of the wood is drat near inaccessible to clean and dry should anything of significant volume spill all over it, so, again, no water pitchers for you. And you take that drat pitcher of beer away from the bar and pour it at your table, sir/ma'am/drunk person.
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Nov 14, 2012 02:05
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We have small pitchers of water for whisky drinkers who like a dash of water with their drink. For drunk people, it's up to me to decide at which point I decide to interpret "ahhhllllllll haee a a'er" as "I am too intoxicated to act with any self-respect whatsoever; would you be so kind as to pour me a pint of water?" rather than "I'll have a pint of lager".
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Nov 14, 2012 11:43
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Are Scottish people mad that the apostrophe is in such an inconvenient place on the keyboard? At least the h isn't too bad
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Nov 14, 2012 14:42
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An Old Boot posted:So... when it comes to women breaking into the business-- let's just say I have a friend who is easy on the eyes but not a knock-out, so any places looking for gimmicky pretty-girl poo poo is pretty much right out-- what are the pitfalls? Beyond the obvious. Assuming you have both your tits and haven't had acid thrown in your face, you'll typically have a better chance of getting hired than an experienced male bartender simply by virtue of being a woman. Go to a high volume type of place that has a young crowd and all female bar staff. The bar I'm working at now is the exception to the rule. We have twelve bartenders and they're all corn fed farm boys in their twenties with the exception of myself along with the bar manager and day bartender who have been working there for sixteen and twenty four years respectively. To be honest I think we could use a couple female bartenders. I still can't tell whether or not this hiring practice is misogynistic in nature or if the manager is employing what I've often called "Plan B". Plan A being to staff your bar to the gills with attractive women despite their ability. This works in some types of bars but in my opinion isn't a viable strategy for anything but a get sloshed college bar. Plan B is to staff your bar with hot guys which, in my opinion, is a much better strategy. What you'll end up getting is a bunch of single women hanging out at the bar to flirt with the bartenders which will in turn attract a flock of horny dudes with cash falling out of their pockets. My bar had an equal number of male and female bartenders (unlike any other bar I've worked at) and I gotta say I really liked it. Having a few clutch female bartenders (I'm looking at you COCKISPOISION) can make all the difference and break up the boys club mentality. I think my current manager would be wise to try and train one of the sharper waitresses next time we need another bartender.
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Nov 15, 2012 00:08
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The old thread has been Archived so I will be cluttering the next page with content from the old thread. Enjoy the trip down memory lane. My First Day Winter 2006 So there I am sitting on my porch in Denver nursing a beer with five others keeping cool in the snow beside me.. The sales from my book have stabilized, my father’s health problems are once again manageable, and my then girlfriend has moved to New York for school without me. John Q Law had even deemed me fit to re-enter society untethered and ended my probation. I had something I hadn’t had in quite a while. Freedom. So what now? Well I did the only sensible thing and sold everything I owned that didn’t fit into an Army duffel bag and bought a one way ticket to San Francisco. I had no job prospects, no place to live, no plan whatsoever. It felt great. Upon arriving in San Francisco I get a bunk in a hostel and immediately begin looking for a place. This turns into a process of going to open house interviews for two months until I find a room with five stoners in the Sunset. To call it a room is generous. It’s a 8’x3 ½’ laundry room. One of my roommates, Reece, is a bar manager at a local catering service and has heard of my book. I quickly find out that he’s the person in the house I get along best with and when he asks me what I plan on doing for work I explain that I just planned on writing and living off my savings and royalties. He tells me he needs a bartender with a lot of experience to help out part time. I told myself I was retired from bartending. I told myself I was going to concentrate on being a serious writer. I told my self that I’d killed that drunken monster that got me famous in the first place. Yea well I also told myself that that rash was probably psoriasis. All I had to do to get hired was show up to the office and say “I’m Reece’s buddy.” And they handed me my W4. The company did most of its business at two of the fanciest art museums in the city. All the clients were high profile and all the events were insanely overpriced. My first day was later that week and was an exhibit opening that would feature a very prominent fashion designer for her and five thousand of her closest friends. There would be celebrities, socialites, and dilettantes all getting blind stinking drunk next to priceless works of art. Sounds like my kind of party. I show up the day of and the museum has been closed so that we can prep for the event. By the time I get there Reece is already running around like a chicken with his head cut off ordering people around and chattering into a secret service style walkie talkie. This is a funny sight because Reece looks like he’s about fourteen and had the physique of a pre pubescent girl Up until then I’d only seen him in his street clothes. He was one of those bicycle hipsters that this city seems to churn out faster than new ways to give a reach around. His typical modicum of dress is an extra small t-shirt heralding the indie band of the month and seemingly spray on jeans with one pant leg rolled up. Now he’s wearing a designer suit and ordering people around like a Gestapo Commandant. Despite all this he would become the one and only superior I have come to respect Reece informs me that I’m going to be in charge of the VIP room and introduces me to the two other guys I’ll be working with. The first one, Shitski, is fresh out of bartending school and has never really bartended a day in his life. The other, Brad, has been with the company for years but this is his first night bartending. So now I have two hours to transform a mural gallery into a VIP bar fit for the stars with a skeleton crew of amateurs. Never say I don’t like a challenge. In just the nick of time we manage to get the museum ready for the party and before I have time to figure out whether or not I remember how to make a Cosmo the people come rushing in to drink themselves to the gills. At this point it had been a couple months since I’d bartended and I was weary of getting back in the saddle in such a dramatic fashion. As it turns out it took all of five minutes and I was flipping bottles, swinging my church key like a greased ninja, and pouring shots eight at a time. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks but you better have a strong arm and a claw hammer to break an old habit. Once I get into the rhythm its smooth sailing. I’m deep in the weeds all night but I handle my orders and put on a good show in the process. Like all fashion events in San Francisco, this one attracted the city’s most prominent drag queens. Around here these people are local celebrities and seem to make a living just “being” places. The most famous of San Francisco’s Queens is here with her entourage and is sticking to the VIP room like many VIPs tend to do. I can’t remember who it was but I read about an old bar owner in NYC who after having three different echelons of VIP rooms in his bar opened up a dirty rat infested store room as the penultimate members only area. The place was filthy and held about ten people tops but the New York elite were willing to give up their first born to get in there. And Andy Warhol sold an empty can of tomato soup for thousands of dollars. The lesson being that exclusivity can be a powerful narcotic. So The Queen pulls up to my station and “her” assistant tells me she needs a straw for her drink so she doesn’t mess up her geisha lipstick job. After being slammed for the last four hours we’re out of things like straws, napkins, and cocktail olives but I was prepared. Reece, having been doing this for a while, knew a thing or two about how to prepare for certain crowds. He’d given me a stash of colorful bendy straws for just such an occasion. I make the drink with perfect presentation and pull the straw out of my coat pocket and tell the assistant that I was saving these just for her. I got a fifty dollar tip and learned an important lesson in this line of work. People who are used to getting their butt kissed like to feel like they‘re getting their rear end in a top hat licked. Once my drink orders die down a little The Queen makes her way over to the bar and begins flirting with me while I make drinks. At one point Reece walks by to check on things and she says “Hey honey! Are you the boss?” He tells her yes. “You need to be nice to this one.” She says massaging my shoulders and bending down from what must be seven and a half feet in the heavens to give me a kiss on the cheek. “He’s the cutest one.” The things I do for money. It’s not long before Rock Star shows up. Rock Star is a singer for a popular Indie band who’s been giving me trouble all night. He was my first customer of the day and was obviously three sheets to the wind and an eight ball in when he first saddled up to my open bar and accused me of under pouring him. I’d been reluctantly serving him all night but I made a decision a while ago that he wasn’t getting poo poo in here for the rest of the night. I informed the other bartenders that he was done and he seemed to disappear for a couple of hour but low and behold he’s back. “Gimme a fuckin' double scotch.” I inform him that he’s cut off and that I’d be more than happy to give him a bottle of water. He slams his fist on the bar and says “Gimme a fuckin' drink you oval office! Do you know who I am?” as he grabs my coat sleeve. The Queen is still standing nearby and takes his hand from my arm and says “Don’t mess with him honey he’s the cutest one!” and slaps him. Rock Star replies by spitting in her face. A bad move. The Queen proceeds to kick the ever loving poo poo out of him like she was possessed by a junkyard dog. The other bartenders and I don’t even have the where withal to call security because we’re so dumbfounded by what we’re seeing. Eventually security shows up just in time to stop The Queen from planting the business end of a stiletto heel in Rock Star’s ear and he is thrown out and she goes to the bathroom to fix her makeup and comes back looking as grand as ever. At that very moment I realize why I got into this line of work to begin with. At the end of the night Reece and I are leaving the museum after doing cleanup and inventory and we share a beer in Golden Gate Park and watch the sunrise. “What did you think?” He asks. I tell him that it was fun but this is only part time till I get along with my writing. “Yea.” He says taking a long pull off his beer and putting an arm around my shoulder. “Sure.”
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Nov 15, 2012 00:15
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Wedding Season What started off as a part time job soon became a full time headache. I had joined the company with the impression that I’d do a couple of shifts a week for extra cash but management had other ideas. Our regional manager, Lin Mei, had grander ideas for my tenure. First things first I feel it necessary to describe Lin Mei a bit. To start things off she did and still does to this day terrify me. This is coming from a man who has been beat within an inch of his life by a cholo crip on PCP in county jail. Upon looking at her the first disturbing thing you realize is that while she is quite attractive she is also quite overweight. By overweight I mean my height and twice my girth but she still has that pretty yet disconcerting Asian girl face. This is tolerable until you enter into salary negotiations and you have her double F sized bresticles thrust in your face. I digress. As I was saying Lin Mei had plans for me and the company and those plans included taking Reece’s job. We were at an impasse as a company and were about to lose three managers for several reasons and Reece was about to be trench promoted to the top and needed a new bar manager. I would later learn that I was hired for this implicit purpose despite signing on as part time. Of mice and men and all that jazz. My writing was going nowhere financially and here I had an offer to make twice what I ever had to do what I do best. You can’t escape who you are even if who you are is a drunken bottle jockey. The bar monkey breathes again. While I try and chronicle what was this year’s wedding season I know that I’ll never do it justice for the very reason that all weddings are the same and I did about a hundred in the span of about six months. Most of our weddings were at a classical art museum in the Presidio and all fell into a cookie cuter format. Setup This is the hard time, the bad time. The painful time and the time that stories that will never be told should be written about. You see the museum closes at five o’clock every day and all of our weddings start at six. That gives us exactly one hair pulling hour to transform the stuffy museum into someone’s special day. Inevitably something was not ordered or something was ordered and did not arrive. This leaves the managers like me to deal with the problem while upper management (Lin Mei and her boss) bark at us about how we get paid well to figure poo poo like this out. All this knowing that the reason we’re in the poo poo in the first place is because one of the ladies in upper management was too hung over to correctly put a rental order in. Cocktail Hour Guests drink white wine and champagne and lament on how pretty the bride looked and how short/spiritual (depending on denomination) the service was. During this time we rate consumption and pick out what may later be our problem guests. These people are almost always in the wedding party. Invite Guests to Enter the Dining Hall At this point the full service bar is full and ready for business and the real drinkers smell the ethanol wafting from the steel spouts on our bottle tops like police bloodhounds. They envelop us and inundate us with drink orders and shots. These people are what I call “weekenders”. People who drink only on occasion and don’t make it a lifestyle like me and my staff. The weekenders always order a drink with a question mark. By that I mean, “Can I have a… Rum and Coke?”. Yes sir right away. That is in fact a drink. You win at drinking you button down cocksmoker. Guests Begin Dining I like to refer to this time as “bartenders can handle their poo poo without burning the place down for a few minutes so the boss goes to his office and has a beer time“. This is a special time and one I endear very much. I go out onto the loading dock with a plate of pulled pork and a pilsner and feed the myriad of creatures Golden Gate Park has to offer at night. The fauna is typically bear sized raccoons and coyotes but occasionally I see a bobcat or (I poo poo you not) a cougar. Speeches/Dances Hey you. Yea you, the best man. You know that speech you’re about to tell? Yea that long and unfunny one that you looked up on the internet (by the way everyone mentions looking their speech up on the internet so don’t do it). Yea so the thing is you’re not funny. In all honesty you’re making people uncomfortable with your attempt to be edgy and even the bride’s grandmother knew you ripped of that last joke from Dane Cook. Just do us a favor and don’t end it with a “”I’m Rick James Bitch!” Humanity will thank you later. As for the dance. I have a standing bet with all of my bartenders. The bet is as follows. If the first dance is “At Last” They owe me a shot. If the father daughter dance is “What a Wonderful World” they owe me a shot. If either dance is any but one of those songs I owe them a shot. Two plus weddings a week for almost a year and I’ve bought an amount of shots I can count on one hand. Dancing Time This is where the bar shows it’s salt. The rest of the crew is in the basement having leftovers but my guys are slamming out drinks like they were working any other club on a Saturday night. These shifts are my litmus test for new hires. We operate two stations for a wedding, me working one and the other bartender working the other, and when poo poo gets thick I’ll leave for a minute or two and see how they handle things on their own. If a person leaves the bar unattended, they’re gone. If they pass out a bottle, they’re gone. If they serve after last call, they’re gone. If however they manage the bar despite not having the most knowledge of procedure and exhibit some modicum of non-retardedness then they work more weddings. Last Call This is tricky. People who have been getting something for free all night do not like to be parted from such thing. Especially booze. Last call is tricky. Sometimes the oval office wedding coordinator doesn’t want the DJ to announce last call. On nights like that we just shut down and people go ballistic. I did one wedding for the daughter of the CEO of a major oil company and after I told him the bar was closed he went up to one of my trainees stations and reached across the bar and manhandled a bottle of cheap champagne and two glasses from him before giving him the finger and storming out. This man was a billionaire captain of industry. As Plato once said, “Cocksuckers come in all shapes and sizes”. And such is my average day. James Woods fucked around with this message at 07:46 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 00:18
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The Stockbrokers Cometh After a summer full of weddings that have blended into each other like so many spilled spirits, my company enters the holidays and a slew of office holiday parties. These are all Fortune 500 companies throwing extravagant get togethers where most of the time people teetotal it so they don’t get too drunk in front of the boss. These were parties where people had a couple of glasses of wine and ate their food daintily. This was not to be the case for the first big holiday party in December. Sixteen hundred drunken brokers from one of the biggest investment firms in the world looking to tie one on to celebrate a good year of raping the middle class over a drink or nine. It wouldn’t be the worst party I’d ever done but then again after getting shot in the knee, getting kicked in the nuts still smarts. All of this and on my loving birthday of all days. We begin planning for this event two months in advance and even then it seems as though we’re hurting for time. Since becoming bar manager I’ve convinced Lin Mei to allow me to hire my own staff and conduct my own interviews. The first guy I get is Walt. Walt has a Phd. In political science and is currently volunteering at a think tank at Berkley hoping for a job. Being sans job he is slumming it in catering and has taken it upon himself to bullshit his way into bartending with a slew of fake references and experience. “How did you know his credentials were inaccurate?” You might ask. Well I have a Litmus test for new bartenders that never fails me. I bring an old bottle of Evan Williams that I keep in the office, fill it with water and give it a jigger, and ask the potential employee to pour a double and a single. Walt does a half assed job at this but I can tell that the guy is smart as poo poo and is trainable. This combined with the fact that he had the balls to bullshit his way in here, coincidentally how I got my first bar gig, convinces me to hire him My next would be protege is a young and rough looking punk named Dan who is sitting in the office bouncing his knee, resume in hand wearing a suit both unconvincingly and uncomfortably. He showed up a full half hour early so his dedication to want the job is not in question. He reminds me of those guys I used to see at my probation hearings over dressing to try and impress the judge. This makes me wonder if he too had papers. When I introduce myself he jumps to attention and thrusts his hand out and gives me a firm handshake and a steady stare. “Oh I get it” I say to myself “A Marine”. Dan passes the bottle test with flying colors and admits that he’d been working private parties on his own and had no real bar experience. I admire his honesty and hire him on the spot. Over the next couple of months I make Walt and Dan my personal projects and give them a crash course in the filthy art. Neither of them has the body of drink knowledge I would like them to have. Walt seemed to think that any smart person could do it given the opportunity and never really studied mixology before applying. His first couple of shifts he would just turn to me and ask the recipe of anything other than a straight call drink. I’d given him a bartending bible and highlighted the necessary drinks but he obviously hadn’t been reading it so the next wedding we worked together I waited till we were in the weeds and when the D.J. called last call I decided it was a good time to go outside and have a smoke. I watched him crumble under the pressure from a nearby window and came back before the guests ripped him apart. From that moment on Walt never asked me for another drink recipe, nor did he need to. Dan didn’t have the same air of arrogance and was eager to learn anything he could. The military had instilled in him an assertiveness that made him a quick learner. Both he and Walt still needed to learn a lot about the drinks we serve so I regularly held drills when I caught them loving off behind the bar. When appropriate I’d sneak up behind the two with an empty beer bottle and smash it into an empty trash can and call out a drink recipe. The two of them would snap to attention and grab their shakers and the first one to make the drink correctly with proper taste and presentation won the drill. Whoever won the most drills at the end of the night got to spend the last hour of their shift with me in my office drinking beer and doing inventory. The event manager Reece and I have been dreading this party for weeks. Our boss Lin Mei has been on the warpath lately and has not allowed either of our departments to prepare for this in the way we know works best. She spends the majority of her time in her office drinking wine while the two of us bust our asses to ensure that an event goes smoothly and now she’s in our face and not budging on a single goddamned thing. Staffing, prep, anything we ask for she says no simply to exude dominance. We deal with this constantly and endure it like a Tibetan monk being flayed by his captors in total silence. I am everything and I am nothing. Before setup starts we go downstairs for a ritual. We take a bottle of Jameson we’d purchased on the way to work out and place it in the liquor cabinet and lock it. We then attach all our gear to our suits. Wine key, church key, wine foiler, pocket knife, and hands free walkie talkie. We give each other a firm handshake and a pat on the back and say “Good luck.” Knowing that the next time we exchange pleasantries will be to finish that entire drat bottle of whiskey at the end of the night. For this particular event the museum is still open so all we have is a single 100’ x100’ room to prepare for this mess. I had to set four bars on wheels as well as thirty buckets full of product and ice and I had no intention of setting up in there with Lin Mei screaming at everyone for the few hours we had for prep. The night before while Dan and I were cutting hundreds of lemons and limes and making gallons of mixers for the three specialty cocktails we had to make tonight I had a chat with Tyrone. Tyrone is one of the security guards and I’ve been greasing the wheels with him for months by sneaking him free beer and food for just such an occasion. I arranged with him to let me set my stuff up in the loading dock downstairs so I could do my job in peace. Working in a museum like this where everyone thinks they’re in charge makes these little Machiavellian exchanges necessary. As my bar staff shows up I get horrible news. One of my lead guys Fred is in the hospital for emergency knee surgery. I was already understaffed for this so this puts me in a pinch. In addition to Walt and Dan I’m left with; Shitski the crazy hipster Pollack who is also my fastest bartender, Shannon a middle aged talky Jew who reminds you of Mike Meyers’ “Coffee Talk” lady, Skeeter a flighty but generally competent surfer bum I trained before Walt and Dan, Clark a supposedly experienced bartender Lin Mei hired two days ago without consulting me, and myself at the helm. The one ray of light in my staffing situation is that Reece has pulled in a favor and gotten Rick to work with us for an evening. Rick was the bar manager before Reece who was the bar manager before me and thus knows his poo poo. As soon as he arrives on the loading dock I feel a subtle sense of relief wave over me. He immediately comes over and gives me a man hug and says. “You’re the boss tonight man, what’s the plan?” I gather everyone around and distribute cigarettes to those who smoke and go over the hell before us. At this point we have two hours to set up four mobile bars that will be distributed to three different wings of the museum. Each area will have a different theme and a different signature cocktail. We can only set up about half of what we need right now because our delivery company was supposed to send us two trucks full of rental equipment and only one truck showed up. It seems they were short a driver and the truck is sitting at their dock waiting for another one to get freed up. When will it show up? That’s anyone’s guess. Once the bars are set we need to get them in position by the dock and wait for Security to tell us over the radio that the normal Saturday patrons have left after the museum closes at 5:30. They'll then give us the all clear to set up. Right now the back corridors of the museum are teeming like an ant farm as the catering company has to move incoming equipment upstairs in small trips while sharing one small freight elevator with two bands, flower people, electricians, AV guys, and a slew of other douchebags. All that and we have only two more hours at that point to set everything else up. I decide to take my guys all the way around the museum uphill and into the entrance opposite the dock thus eliminating waiting for the elevator and saving us a ton of time. We do our initial setup before the museum closes and tensions are running high and the rest of our supplies aren’t even here yet. While my staff was setting up the bars I checked in with Reece in the area where the rest of the catering company was setting up and Lin Mei was in there screaming at the rental company on her cell and injecting the word gently caress into places I never knew possible. At about 5:00 my people are ready and we begin pushing heavy carts holding thousands of pounds of liquor up a steep hill to a discreet place by a door we can go through when the signal comes in. 5:29 and we are all hovered around the carts and I have one index finger on my earpiece and the other up in the air ready to thrust down to start the assault. “All Clear.” I hear on the radio and we rush in like marauding bandits. Every bartender has a buddy that they’ll be working at their station with and we pair off and set up our bars independently around the museum. Normally on an event like this I would be running back and forth between all four bars and when one gets in trouble I pick up a station and make a couple hundred drinks until the crowd gets manageable and then make my way to the next bar that gets in trouble. Lin Mei has hamstrung me on staff so now I’m permanently attached to the main bar all night and can’t check and see if my guys are in the weeds. This is combined with the last minute announcement that I will have no barbacks tonight. I need to remember to write this down as raise asking ammunition for my next performance review. Forty five stressful minutes goes by and two months of preparation and several months of training with my staff is paying off. Our delivery finally arrives but thankfully not so late that we’ll have to delay the start of the event. We have over an hour to go and we are about ninety percent completed with prep. Just as I begin to take a sigh of relief and think about giving my guys a lunch break it happens. BEEP BEEP BEEP AN EMERGENCY HAS BEEN REPORTED, PLEASE EXIT THE BUILDING, BEEP BEEP BEEP. The motherfucking fire alarm. People evacuate in all directions and I can’t hear my radio over the sirens. Our staff is scattered all around the gargantuan building and we clamor to get everyone in one place. Reports are sketchy at first but for the half hour we’re outside we eventually learn that some genius cook put a hot box full of meat directly underneath a smoke detector. We get the all clear from the fire department to go back in and have roughly half an hour to get re-organized and finish up. The party is set to start at 7:30 and at 7:29 I have a dozen server monkeys with trays full of wine and martinis ready to go as we open the doors. Crisis averted, for now. I get to my station and bartend the first hour surprisingly casually. The crowd is thin and relatively old and don’t seem to have much interest in booze save for a glass of wine and a Manhattan per couple. Things are beginning to look like they’re going to be okay so I tell Clark, whom I’m paired with so I could keep an eye on him, that I’m going to step away for a bit and I go outside for a much deserved smoke. I stand out by the Koi pond in front of the museum and take a deep breath of ocean air and contemplate calling my fiancé. We’re due to wed in Vegas in two days by an Elvis impersonator. Things have been rough at home with both of our hectic work schedules and I just want to say hello and tell her I love her knowing I won’t be getting home until after the sun rises. I dial her number and just as she says “Hello.” I see them. Nearly a dozen limos pulling up in front of the museum and out pour what look like several hundred frat boys in designer suits with women who look like hookers on their arms. It’s the brokers and they were showing up late hoping that the partners would have gone home by now. “Honey? Are you there?” I’ll have to call you back I say as I snap my phone shut and run inside. What follows is sheer madness as hundreds of these rich cocksuckers hit my bar like a angry mob slamming against a wall of police riot shields. Each person in line is ordering for six others who can’t get close to the bar. The worst part is that they all want something like a Cosmo or a Long Island. Drinks that by themselves are fine but bought in volume are a pain in the rear end. The worst are the people who muscle their way through the crowd and have no idea what they loving want. I get women in skimpy dresses looking up and at the wall behind me as if they’re confused as to why there’s no Starbucks menu. I’m making drinks at lightning speed and flair tossing bottles with velocity that if one went into the crowd I’d be liable for ruining what must be my years income in plastic surgery. I still have my earpiece in and at one point hear what at the time I thought was “Dave what’s going on with the lines at the bars?”. I put down my shaker and talk into my sleeve transmitter saying that if you give me some goddamned mutherfuckin' barbacks that I could work faster. As it turns out it was Lin Mei saying “Dave you’re doing a great job with the lines at the bars.” I don’t find this out till the end of the night so inexplicably I get four bussers sent to me asking how they can help. I send one to each bar and start having them do the normal barback bitchwork that makes this kind of volume manageable. The next few hours are a blur. I never had a moments rest until last call. The funny thing is that it went by like nothing. Any bartender can tell you that in a high volume shift hours can pass like minutes and before you know it its last call and then the real fun starts. At last call I tell Clark bottles down and run to each of the bars and tell them the same. Last call at open bars, especially with a rich clientele, is a pain in the rear end. The same people who were tipping you five bucks a drink one minute are throwing their ice in your face and trying to reach over the bar and steal booze. When I get back to my station I find some chick behind the bar with a bottle of liquor in each hand about to make drinks. I grab the bottles and get her out from behind the bar and she looks at me with bloodshot puppy dog eyes and says “Please.” I again tell her no and she proceeds to spit in my face and starts maniacally laughing and giving me the finger. I switch to the security channel on my radio and tell Tyrone that I need a guest forcibly ejected and give her description and my location. I then reach into my bucket and withdraw a cold beer, cap it, and proceed to slam the whole thing while looking at her as she watches and curses. Just as I’m done Tyrone grabs her by the hair and yells “C’mon bitch!” and drags her by her hair to the exit. Things are under control for now and I start giving out breaks to one bartender at a time per bar as the guests hang around for the last dry half hour of the party. Clark, who was loving with his phone not three feet from the drunken bitch who was stealing the booze, asks if he can take a break. I explain to him as calmly as I can how stupid what he just did was and tell him that he’ll get a break when I say. Up to that point he’d done a great job but I know he’s tired and his feet hurt like hell. When the adrenaline wears off he’ll feel like poo poo and want nothing but to sit down. What I’m doing is being a dick. What I’m also doing is ensuring that for the rest of the time he works for me that no client will ever steal booze without a fight from him. I go to the kitchen to put some form of food into my mouth, at that point I hadn’t eaten all day, and see Lin Mei, Penny the executive chef, and Gail the sales manager, all stumble out of the office drunk as sailors and laughing the live long day. Lin Mei sees me and gives me a hug and slurs “Dave.. Dave you.. did a great job tonight. Th.. Thank you. We’re goin' home. Oh habby birfday.” The last of the guests haven’t even left yet and Reece, myself, and a couple dozen others will be here cleaning up and breaking down for another seven hours. Dan just so happened to be walking through the kitchen on his break and saw the exchange and walked by and said “Sergeants run the Corps.”. Oorah. What follows is hours of tedious cleanup followed buy a not so tedious inventory session downstairs with me and my bartenders drinking beers and exchanging stories while we listen to Creedence’s greatest hits. Reece and I let the rest of the people in our departments go a little early and stay another two hours by ourselves to clean up the little odds and ends everyone else forgot. At the end of the night we clock out and go down to the liquor cabinet to get our Jameson. We take a bench in Golden Gate Park and sit in silence for a moment drinking as the twilight makes its way through the fog. Eventually Reece says “Told you so.”. James Woods fucked around with this message at 08:17 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 00:21
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The Yacht Club A story that will live in my company’s memory, The Yacht Club, was perhaps the worst loving party we ever threw. I’ve put off telling this story for a while for the simple reason that I never thought I could do it justice. It takes place before The Stockbrokers Cometh, and stands in my mind as the penultimate rear end ram that is my career with this company. We were still in the throws of Wedding Season and I was still raw at being bar manager. The Yacht Club was to be the party to end all parties. Ever since I took this job I’ve been one upped by longer lasting employees about some mythical party that was staffed by three people with twelve thousand guests always ending with “you shoulda been there”. Since Yacht Club I don’t get that anymore. The setup was five bars in five different locations in the museum all with different drink availability and all with their own theme. What made this particularly difficult was that all the bars were Cash meaning that not only did we have to dispense the drinks for some five thousand plus individuals but we had to keep accounting with a staff that isn't used to handling money or registers. After having done two full weeks worth of work to prep I find myself at the museum at nine in the morning putting out fires and generally having to turn a full blown shitstorm into a controlled blaze. Reece and I are about to pull our hair out over Lin Mei’s outrageous last minute demands but with just an hour before guests arrive we seem to be keeping it together. Then it happens. I hear a muddled radio transmission over my hands free walkie talkie and press the earpiece into my ear to hear more clearly. The earpiece is a soft rubber deal meant to expand with heat and as I realize I press it in too far I begin to pull it out only to have the cable break free and leave the earpiece in place. At the time I see this as a minor inconvenience and ask Gail, the sales manager, to fetch some tweezers from her purse to remove the object from my ear canal. Gail tries her best but ends up pushing the bastard against my eardrum with the tweezers and drops them and calls security. Security shows up and sticks a flashlight in my ear and promptly says, “This boy needs to go to the emergency room”. Lo and behold Reece calls my then fiancé and says “Dave…..accident…emergency room…come soon…… All in all I’m fine for the time being but have to leave for insurance reasons. I wait on the loading dock for about an hour before my bride to be shows up to find me not bleeding from the ears like she thought I would be but all together in an incredible amount of pain as the object in my ear continued expanding due to body heat at every passing minute. What followed was a wild goose chase around the Presidio trying to follow one of the security guard’s directions to the nearest hospital until we finally gave up and she took me to General downtown. At this point the pain I was experiencing can be likened to Chekov and the brain worms in The Wrath Of Khan as my brains seemingly wanted to explode from my head as the ear piece worked its way inward. The ER Doctor tried to extract the object through many normal means with a plethora of instruments but he eventually gave up saying that “We need to use the tool”. The tool was a sinister looking device he thrust into my ear canal after saying “Stay still, if I gently caress up I may make you deaf.”. He proceeded to maneuver the Lovecraftian piece of machinery into my skull and for a moment I experienced a period of both pain and ecstasy I thought unimaginable. I have been stabbed, shot, beaten within an inch of my life, but never prior had I experienced true pain. Once the object was removed I looked to my bride to be and said one thing. “Take me to work” And to work I went. I was still wearing my radio and I called in “Elvis has re-entered the building". What followed was a tirade of messages from people on radios asking “Did you really come back?” “Yes” I said. I’d only been gone for less than an hour. And the night went on. The bars had been set up haphazardly as Shitski had been deemed as my replacement, and the place was a mess. I spent the next frantic seven hours getting the place up to speed but as last call arrived I was victorious to deal with this bullshit another day. Reece and I stayed at the museum until about six a.m. that night to make the place pretty and as we left we grabbed a bottle of Jameson 12 year we’d been saving from the liquor cabinet. Upon leaving Reese set his bag down to hard, containing the whiskey, and cracked it. We feverishly saved the remains along with the two cups we’d smuggled out and drank the half bottle in the park as the sun rose. “Hell of a job.” Reese said downing his glass of whiskey. “That it is.” I say not knowing or caring whether an ember of glass was working it’s way through my esophagus. This is my job and this is what I do. James Woods fucked around with this message at 08:27 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 00:24
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An Old Boot posted:Sidenote: I was not aware Evan Williams was a thing. I just took for granted that I could sip it with or without a water chaser and not hate my life. I guess it just blended in with he rest of the candidates in the "cheap and not Early Times" category that I never really noticed if it was worse or better than the rest of them. If you haven't read it already. The Evan Williams Rant Sit at my bar long enough or take me to a pub and get a few too many beers in me and eventually you'll hear this diatribe. Too be honest I'm surprised I haven't gone off on this yet in this thread. Here ya go. A lot of what I'm about to tell you is subject to conjecture and or urban myth surrounding the history of American Whiskey. Take my words with a grain of salt as I am no Yale educated historian but rather a man who has spent many a year on the business end of a bar and heard many a yarn about two men mired in the annals of our country's drinking history. Those men and their associated spirits are Evan Williams and Jack Daniels. You've all heard of Mr. Daniels but who is this Evan Williams fellow you ask? Well I'll bet you a nickel that his product is available at your local liquor store. I'll even bet you another that you've noticed it on the shelf and dismissed it for a very unfortunate reason. Let me explain. This is a bottle of Jack Daniels "Tennessee Whiskey(I'll get into that later)" like one that you will see in your local liquor store or any bar in America.  Now look a couple of shelves down and you will see this.  Now you're saying "Oh yea, Evan Williams, that generic Jack Daniels poo poo." This could not be further from the truth. Evan Williams was established in 1783 in Bourbon County Kentucky and is credited as being Kentucky's first Bourbon. The techniques by which Evan Williams was originally and still to this day is made has become the yard stick by which all American Whiskeys are measured. Then "Why" you’re asking "does the bottle look just like Jack Daniels?" Jack Daniels Distillery claims to have been founded in 1866 in Lynchburg Tennessee (historians currently believe the real date to be in the mid eighteen seventies) almost a hundred years after Evan Williams had been bottling with their trademark square bottle with the black label. This is where fuzzy history and the conspiracy theories set in. The bourbon business in the late nineteenth century was a tumultuous trade. During the expansion of the frontier in the West several new distilleries were sprouting up in states like Virginia, Tennessee, Missouri, or even places as far West as Kansas or as North as New York to fuel the livers of those brave frontiersmen and outlaws alike. Even in Canada or countries in Europe distilleries were monopolizing on the “Bourbon” brand. While all this was happening the owners of the original Kentucky distilleries were trying to protect the brand and traditions of what America had come to know as Bourbon. Several spirits some no more than maple colored moonshine were being sold as Bourbon across the country by these imitators and it seemed that the very traditions of the South were at stake. Southern pride had recently taken a hell of a whipping and they weren’t about to let a bunch of foreigners and Yankees tell them what Bourbon was. A series of Congressional resolutions over the years tried to dictate exactly what could be sold as Bourbon or Whiskey for that matter. What followed was many opportunists foreign and domestic alike who tried to sidestep the measures put in place to get their product to the mouths of the sons of the soil who had grown up with the spirit. One such opportunist was Jack Daniels. He realized that all the quibbling over whether you used sour mash, distilled in Bourbon County Kentucky, or aged in charred oak barrels was academic for one simple reason. Bourbon drinkers were by far mostly illiterate. All Mr. Daniels had to do was approximate the taste of real Bourbon and package it in the one thing the hillbillies of the day would recognize. The square black labeled bottle of Evan Williams that their fathers and grandfathers before them had drank. He called his new product “Tennessee Whiskey” in an effort to avoid the complications associated with labeling a spirit Bourbon but, as I said, few were really reading the label. A feud between the to companies sparked and went on in relative silence as far as the buying public was concerned for several decades until it was rendered moot in 1920 with the 18th Amendment and the prohibition of alcohol in the United States. In the thirteen years that followed the American distilleries tried to make due by merely exporting their product to places like Canada and Europe, only to have it smuggled back into the states by bootleggers, but these sales were dismal in comparison to the era of pre-prohibition. Evan Williams had not fared well in the feud and there are to this day stories of the underhanded tactics used by Jack Daniels in trying to bury the label they had tried so hard to emulate. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933 The Jack Daniels company had survived the storm of prohibition the best of the old American distilleries and was able to get a strangle hold on the American market as the streets once again flowed with Whiskey. Sadly to this day when most people think American Whiskey they think Jack Daniels and not the age old tradition of Kentucky Bourbon. Even Williams struggled for decades and despite the ironic stigma of being a Jack Daniels imitator it still to this day makes bourbon the way they have for over two hundred years. In recent years the brand has been making a name for itself once again and has been several wining awards and ribbons for its classic Black Label. It retains that smooth taste associated with Bourbons seemingly superior and vastly more expensive and lacks the overly smoky taste often associated with brands such as Jim Beam or the harsh sweetness of Jack Daniels. Over the years Evan Williams has refused to compromise their classic bottle design and label despite its unfortunate association. Another thing they have refused to compromise is the price. Evan Williams was founded as the spirit of the everyman. That simple and elegant indulgence that both a country farmer and Southern gentleman could enjoy and appreciate. When I go to my neighborhood liquor store I saunter over to the Whiskey section, hitch my pants a bit and take a knee as my eyes pass over such brands as Knob Creek, Jack Daniels, and Jim Beam in descending order until I finally see good old Evan Williams sitting sadly on the bottom shelf. I proudly grab myself a bottle and when I get to the checkout isle and shell out eight bucks for a liter I am confident in the knowledge that while I could afford the hundred dollar bottle on the top shelf behind the locked glass in the fancy wooden box, my wallet isn't making this purchase, my taste is. James Woods fucked around with this message at 00:32 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 00:28
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My Trip to Spain After an agonizingly long flight from San Francisco and a quick stop in Frankfurt we arrived in Madrid and were taken to our hotel in the Plaza Mayor, one of the largest plazas in the old center of town. After settling in we spent our first afternoon walking around the old gardens and parks in the city occasionally stopping into tiny little local haunts for a beer and tapas. These tiny bars seemed to have a slow but steady stream of locals stopping in for a beer and a quick bite while they bullshit about football or watch bullfighting on TV. Most of the locals joints gave you free tapas (olives, cheese or ham on bread, fresh roasted almonds, etc.) if you were hanging around for a few drinks. I learned that tapas evolved fro the tradition of placing a stale piece of bread on top of your beer or glass of wine to keep the flies out of it while you go to take a leak, much like the Mexicans put limes in their beers for the same reason. These bars each have the same small assortment of liquor (Johnny Red, Jim Beam, Cuervo, Tanquerey, and other similar spirits) in small .750 bottles with built in pour spouts like on American 1.75s. Though liquor is available beer by far dominates the day and nigh time bar scene. In Madrid the local brew is Cruzcampo, a Pilsner I came to enjoy. After dinner we went to Malasana, the young and hip district of the city, to bar hop a ton of bars and discos. Like most of Europe tipping at bars in Spain is not the norm. You typically just leave what's left over that's less than a Euro after paying your tab for the night. This means even less money for the bartenders since most places seem to keep a running tab for the night and at the end sometimes even ask you what you drank. This honor system practice can go on all night so I decided to try a little experiment. Upon getting our first round I handed the bartender a Euro and told him in the best Spanish I could that "This is for you.". For the rest of our time there I was always served first when I came up to the bar and my Wife's scotches always got a triple pour on her huge glass of "Scotch Sin Hielo" or Scotch Neat of which she had about a dozen. The next day after I peeled my wife up out of her own filth off our hotel room's bathroom floor we walked the old ethnic barios of the Lavapies. This area is largely unseen by tourists as it's teeming with dark alleys crawling with Indian, Moroccan, Senegalese, and Chinese immigrants. We ended up the afternoon in the Atocha bario where we drank wine and ate tapas well into the night before going back to a great bar called "Tupper Ware" back in Malasana. The crowd was all locals and within minutes of us entering a movie began being projected on the wall featuring a guy in a bunny suit running around Madrid with a sign reading "Puta de Madre" on it while all the Spanish kids began singing a song in unison. Then from upstairs came that very same guy in the bunny suit dancing and taking pictures with people. What all this meant was beyond me all I know is that I'm glad we happened to stop in that random bar at that very minute. Our final day in Madrid was spent at the Paseo del Prado, a beautiful park in the southeast part of town where we had drinks and relaxed by the lake. That night we decided to check out an area all out guidebooks told us to avoid called lower Gran Via, the red light district, because gently caress it that's why. We entered the first tiny bar we saw and the first thing we noticed other that the dim red light was that it had to be over a hundred degrees in the place. The next thing we noticed was that the only people in here were a half dozen gorgeous Spanish women nearly naked and a surly bartender. It would appear we were in a Madrid whorehouse. Figuring "when in Rome" we ordered two overpriced beers and sat back sweating and taking in the atmosphere before scuddling out after being stared down the whole time by the Spanish whores. Next we went to a Morrocan themed bar/cafe near out hotel where we sat on pillows and mingled with some young American travelers from NYU who were amazed at the idea of a married couple our age who traveled to to other countries and partied like we did. It made me feel old but at the same time at ease that marriage thus far was not the death sentence I had been expecting back in my youth. The next leg of our trip was to be spent in Seville and we hopped a first class high speed train to get us there in just over two hours. Upon arrival we took a cab to our hotel, an ancient high walled Villa in the middle of Santa Cruz. After settling in we decided to explore the city and see the Seville Cathedral and the Alcazar. As soon as we got into the central part of town we came to a disappointing realization. We'd come south to Seville to escape the urban cities and experience an authentic slice of Spanish life and Seville is about as far from that as you can get. Due to the huge number of American and British students that travel to Seville for the summer to study Spanish the town has turned into a Disneyland like caricature of ancient Spain. Beside castles and churches dating back to the Roman empire are Starbucks and American themed bars. The real irony of this is that in Seville you don't need to speak a kick of Spanish to get around. This is not to say that the Cathedral and Alcazar were a disappointment. The Seville Cathedral was a mosque conquered in the 1200s by the Spanish and converted into on of the largest cathedrals in Europe. The legend goes that whoever was in charge of it's construction told the architects "Build it so big that future generations will think of us as lunatics.". Well it worked. The thing is loving massive and a testament to hubris. The Alcazar is a palace and garden behind the Cathedral that was equally impressive and makes me feel better about not having time to see the Alhambra over in Grenada. That night we decided to get lost in the old city, a labyrinth of crisscrossing roads barely wide enough to accommodate the go kart sized cars and scooters zipping around. The confusion of navigating this expanse cannot be articulated and must be experienced. We managed to find a couple of bars but felt we hadn't located the locals scene yet and left that for the next evening. The next day we went to the impressive Placia de Espania and walked the river and stopped for the occasional drink until nightfall. That night we got a late dinner and made our way to a plaza with an odd drinking crowd. On one side of the plaza was an old Church upon the steps of which lurked local kids with forties of Spanish beer, Sangria in the box, and the makings for their own Rum and Cokes. Across the Plaza were a strip of bars with tall boy tables catering to the foreign students pounding them down until last call. In between the two crowds was a no mans land so we decided to get out beers from the student bars and sit on the church steps to rub elbows with the locals. After an hour or two of that we lucked out and found a packed locals bar back in the labyrinth of old town. To call it a bar is a bit of a misnomer. It was more of a alley with two bars packed next to each other that sold only 8 oz. bottled beers while you stood in the cramped alley and socialized with the crowd. It was a satisfying experience and we felt we'd taken the pulse of the town being the only foreigners there. The next day we flew to Barcelona for the last leg of our trip. Our hotel was right off La Ramblas, a packed plaza extending from the center of town and south to the beach. Along the plaza are a myriad of wares being sold to tourists most stupefying of which are vendors selling exotic animals like Macaws, Prairie Dogs, Chipmunks, and Chinese dwarf Hamsters in little cages. The rest of the day was spent roaming the old part of town, Barri Gotic and La Riberia, where we saw more old cathedrals and old Roman defensive walls. We spent the evening in El Raval, the seedy red light district once frequented by American Sailors and bar hopped with mixed results among pushers, pimps, and African prostitutes to several hooka bars until we finally lucked out and found a heavy metal bar frequented by locals. When we first entered we found the place terrifyingly hot and were worried we'd found another cathouse. The place ended up being pretty cool and I had a grand time drinking huge beers and playing pool with some local kids who were mesmerized by my skill seemingly because few bars in Spain have room for pool tables and people rarely get the opportunity to practice. The next day we went down the beach and were treated to the best weather we'd seen all week. The decision was made at night that we'd travel to L'Exiample to check out the clubs in the city's gay district. Now all of Spain has a late night culture. People eat dinner anywhere from 9pm to Midnight but this is punctuated even more in Barcelona. Most bars don't even open until 10pm and some clubs don't open their doors until 12:30-2:00am. One place we found advertised having no cover if you went in before 4:00am. We found a friendly tapas bar and sat drinking beer, Estrella being the brand in Barcelona, and chatted until about midnight when we decided to hit up a club. The club in question was a place called Aire and just so happened to be the most popular dance club for lesbians in the city. Now for some reason or another lesbians love my wife. Back home whenever we go to our local Gay bar (something almost everyone does in San Francisco gay or not) she is aggressively hit on by the muff-huffers. My wife decided to switch from beer to Vodka and Redbull and I began mixing Whiskey with my beer and the butch bartenders were giving us more than generous pours. Soon a beautiful little Senorita, we've decided to refer to her as Maria, begins flirting with my wife. What follows is hazy but to the best of our recollection we drank the night away with her before bringing her back to our hotel room where we all proceeded to bang the everliving poo poo out of each other. Not your Norman Rockwell honeymoon I know but I'm not complaining. It took my wife and me a couple of hours the next morning to make sense of what had happened the night before and when we did the mental rewind we were amazed at the debauchery even we had managed to accomplish. After the walk of shame back through our hotel lobby we dragged our respective hangovers to breakfast followed by our first touristy sights for the trip. In that morning and afternoon we crammed in the Picasso museum, the Aquarium, and the Erotic Museum all before 1:00pm. We then decided to head back to our room and watch bad American movies in Spanish and order room service until nightfall. I had two passes to the biggest club in the city that I found in my pocket that day (where I got them I have no clue) and decided that since it was our last night in town what the gently caress. We had an extravagant meal at a Catalan restaurant where I had fajitas with steak, mushrooms, and foi gras that topped any other food from the trip. After dinner we went back to L'Exiample for a repeat of the madness and started at a basement cocktail bar I'd heard about. Now let me take a break from the story to talk about bartending in Spain. A majority of bartenders there do nothing all night but cap or pull beers and only occasionally pour liquor with a mixer on the side from a small collection of dusty bottles behind them. This mirrors much of what I've seen in other countries in Europe and explains why Europeans seem dumbfounded by the idea of American bartenders being highly skilled and well paid. The only mixers seem to be bottled Coke or Tonic and not until this final night did I see anyone use a shaker. This final bar was the exception. It was a true classic cocktail bar nestled in a quaint little basement that had all the atmosphere of a depression era speakeasy. The bartender was highly skilled and crafted every cocktail to perfection in the age old way that many American bartenders have either forgotten or never learned in the first place. I wanted to compliment the bartender on her skill but the Catalan dialect prevented me from articulating it properly so I made my appreciation known with a handsome tip. We decided to hell with the club and stayed there until my wife got so inebriated that I feared she wouldn't make the trip back to the hotel. We left tipsy as hell and made our way home knowing that the day of hell and the long commute home would follow tomorrow. The next day we barely made our flight to Frankfurt as the Lufthansa check in lines were stuffed to the gills with German families screaming at the inept attendants. We made our plane just in time and had a quick jaunt to Frankfurt with enough of a layover to take a train into town to have some beers and a brat at a afternoon festival. Again we barely made our next flight as the customs area was packed and understaffed and again we raced through the airport to our plane with minutes to spare. I slept the whole way home and crawled into my apartment to be greeted by my insane dog just a few hours ago. In closing, Spain is a wonderful country and I highly suggest a trip. The entire country has a laid back attitude and the idea of "siesta" not only extends to businesses closing for a couple hours a day but reflects itself in all aspects of their society. If you make an effort with the language and don't mind going off the map to see some of the off menu locales you can have a truly unique and intoxicating experience.
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Nov 15, 2012 00:37
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The poo poo Storm This story takes place the next year when Tim, the new manager who was brought in by corporate to baby-sit our division, asked Reece and me if we could do him a favor. Tim was formerly the manager of one of our other contracts at AT&T Park where the San Francisco Giants play and they had a huge all day country music festival coming up and were short on bartenders. Tim begged us to go over and help out and at the time we agreed due to us wanting to make an ally out of him and the promise of “Piles of cash”. Had we known what we were in for we would have told him to shove that favor straight up his rear end. The day of the concert comes and as soon as we get off the subway by the ballpark we know we’re not in Kansas anymore. There were Wrangler jeans and Stetsons as far as the eye could see and the parking lot was jam-packed full of pickups the size of jumbo jets. All the bars surrounding the stadium were packed with thousands of these mutants from the sticks and they were already three sheets to the wind before 2pm. They had murder in their eyes and looked like they half expected a gang of homosexuals to jump from the shadows and sodomize them. “Does this make you homesick?” Reece asks. “Eat a dick Nancy.” I reply as we approach the employee entrance. When Reece and I get to the gate we have no idea what to expect. All Tim had given us was a map written on a napkin and the name Gail, the woman we were to report to. At the employee entrance we wait for ages as security figures out who we are and who can bring us inside. Eventually Gail shows up and quick introductions are made and we’re rushed into the inner catacombs of the stadium. We’re given a place to change and once we’re geared up are given the curtest orientation possible. She basically tells us that we’re going to be working a station by ourselves and that we’ll only have five different kinds of liquor; Jack, Smirnoff, Jose, Capt. Morgan’s, and Triple Sec and that all drinks will be ten bucks each. That is literally all she tells us before ushering us back into the tunnels and eventually out onto the floor where thousands of rednecks are already mobbing the various concession stands. She hands us each a jigger and a walkie talkie and tells us that our station is about a hundred yards through the crowd on the left, that we open in half an hour, and that we should call her if we need anything and runs off to other business. Reece and I look at each other, toss the jiggers over our shoulders, and head out into the unknown. After a bit of walking we find what we think is our station. All it is is two portable bars boxed in by big metal cages containing cases of liquor and a couple of registers. Behind the bar is a guy unloading our supplies for the night. We ask him all kinds of questions like how the registers work, what to do if we need to use the bathroom, and when we close, but all he says is “Nigga I just drop this poo poo right here and that’s all I know.” We would soon find out that this level of organization and professionalism was the status quo. We take inventory of our stocks and while we’re flush with booze we only have one twenty pound bag of ice each and two cases of each mixer. Now Reece and I have to crunch the numbers on product consumption on a daily basis and know that with a full line, which has already developed despite us not being open, we will run out of everything but warm liquor in less than an hour. If that weren’t bad enough we had no idea how the registers worked as in nearly twenty years of bartending experience between us we’d never seen their make before nor did we even know if they had money in them. Another pressing concern was what we would do with all the tons of trash we would inevitably accumulate. There were no trashcans in the station so for the time being we set up all the empty liquor boxes between us and hoped real cans were en route. We voiced all of these concerns over the radio and were assured help was on the way and we waited as the clock ticked to opening time and a mob of rednecks began pounding on the bar screaming “When you queers gonna open?”. Less than five minutes before we’re supposed to open a huge black woman pushes through the crowd and makes her way behind our station and says “You boys the bartenders?”. Reece and I look at each other and I know we’re both trying to come up with some smart assed thing to say but decide against it and just teller her yes. “Well I got some money for y'all.” She shows us how to open the registers but admits that she doesn’t know how to ring anything up. Money in hand we give the registers a once over and find a button labeled “$10” and another reading “AT” which we assume is amount tendered. I test it by pressing the ten dollar button twice and then the AT button and low and behold the register rings a twenty dollar transaction and says zero change. We can now take money and will just have to do the math, albeit simple, in our heads and just say gently caress it to credit cards. I give Reece the thumbs up to tell him that I got it and we blow each other a kiss and get to business. We open on time but the rednecks are pissed and order drinks ten at a time and we serve them despite being instructed to only sere two drinks per ID. On top of being drunk and rowdy each and every one of these mongoloids is pulling the “Can you give me a little extra.” bullshit and we soon realize why we were given the jiggers that we discarded earlier. These hillbillies are from that vast inland California wasteland where a bottle of Bud costs a buck and it’s commonplace to lose your virginity in a Walmart parking lot so the idea of a couple of citified faeries charging them a tenner for a single must seem like highway robbery. This is where the simple flair trick of the long pour can save your skin. Not only does the long pour look impressive but it gives off the illusion of more liquor being poured if done correctly. This seems to placate the bitching about the price and once we find our rhythm we enter full on gently caress you in the weeds time. Now that Reece and I are a couple of managerial stooges we rarely get the opportunity to bartend together and the prospect of doing so again was half the reason we agreed to do this in the first place. When we work together we speak in a language all our own that consists mainly of grunting and broken sentences like “Where’s the thing?” “Over by the stuff.”. We eventually break into bottle flair less out of flashiness and more out of habit and start tossing bottles back and forth like the crazed juggling bar monkeys we are. We’re continually running out of supplies especially ice and it seems that just as we completely run out of something our screams are heard over the walkie and resupply slowly trickles in but it’s never enough. Some random guy will drop a flat of Coke or a bag or two of ice but we’re forced to conscript any stadium employee we can find and get them to beg borrow and steal what we need from other booths. What also remains a problem is the trash situation. What started between us as a few cardboard boxes for trash quickly overflowed and grew to be a waist high pile of bottles that grew as customers started tossing their empties behind the bar as well. Now I don’t know what it’s like where you live but where I’m from if you tossed an empty behind the bar the bartender would shove an umbrella up your rear end and open it. Not to mention that I’m busting my hump working at speeds worthy of legend and they have the audacity to complain about the wait. Theses inbred fucks are just plain rude and being as I don’t really work here I just abuse em' right back. Don’t have your order ready when you get to the bar, gently caress you, next. Complain about the pour, gently caress you, next. Looking at me funny, gently caress you, next. Some guy cuts in line in front of two chicks that have been coming up to my station all night and being polite so I tell him not only am I skipping him but he’s cut off. He threatens to go to my boss and I tell him to be my guest because it’s my last day and that he can gently caress his mother while he’s at it. I’m getting years of pent up aggression from working fine dining out abusing these people and they keep coming back for more and they’re tipping like I’m throwing in free handjobs. We started off putting the tips in cups behind us but there was soon too much so we just started cramming handfuls of wet filthy cash into our bags. We’re breaking all the rules. We stopped carding, we‘re over serving, over pouring, all the poo poo we train our guys to never do we’re doing it. Then the bar gods get angry. For hours people have been coming up and telling Reece and me all the crazy poo poo that’s going on in the bathrooms. Apparently all the women’s bathrooms got clogged up and became a knee deep shitswamp and the women were now squatting in front of God and everyone in the urinals. Well just as we think we’re in the clear and things begin to slow down ever so slightly, Reece feels a little trickle on his head. He looks up and overhead a pipe is starting to leak. I ask him “Do you think that that’s the water from…” “Shut up.” The leak gets worse and soon enough he’s drenched head to toe and as the sun goes down and the fog rolls in he’s freezing his rear end off. The leak grows and before long it’s getting us both wet but we press on until finally Gail shows up and sees us covered in booze and sewer water standing on either side of a mountain of broken glass and trash. “Oh my God.” She says. “You guys can’t work like this.” “Funny you should mention that.” I say. “We were thinking the same thing.” At this point in the night the final act had started and Reece and I were getting only a couple of customers at a time so we tell Gail thanks for the memories but we’re getting the gently caress out of here. She zeroes our tills and says “Ho-lee poo poo!” Each of us had done over ten thousand dollars in just six hours. We later found out that the next highest station had done only $3,500. Gail thanks us profusely and gives us each one of her cards and says we can come back any time. We say not to call us that we’ll call her. After we get changed and take a Mexican shower in the employee john we decide to just toss the work clothes we were wearing because not only are they soaked and smell like poo poo but we can’t fit them in our bags along with all of our tip money. We make our way outside and I roll Reece a cigarette. He doesn’t smoke but every once and a while at times like these I know he needs one and he accepts it without protest. We share our smoke in silence while looking out over the bay and eventually I ask him what time it is. He looks into his big bag of filthy money and says “It’s time to get really loving drunk.” James Woods fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 00:39
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A New Beginning February 2009 For Lent, I'm apparently going to be giving up sleep. I've spent the last month of my unemployment in an unshaven cocoon of my own filth haphazardly sending out resumes on Craigslist. In the current economy this is like trying to make your presence known at an ACDC concert with a dog whistle. Last Saturday I kicked myself as I noticed a restaurant a block away from my house that was holding an open call the Friday before for a General Manager. Well poo poo, I thought, I wish I'd have seen that sooner. On a whim I decide to go in and drop off a resume anyway. When I get there I see that what was formerly little more than a fast food joint has been transmogrified into a full fledged bar. The owner just happens to be there when I go in and I get just enough of his time to hand over my resume. He tells me that he interviewed a hundred and fifty people two days before and has narrowed it down to two guys but he'll fit me in for an interview between the two of them if I show up not one minute before or one minute after noon the next day. What the gently caress. That night I engage in a ritual I haven't partaken in in years and get completely shitfaced to prepare for the interview. You see I always go into interviews hungover. It started because when I was younger I was always hungover no matter what I had to do that day but it evolved into a way to back myself into a corner so I was forced to perform. At 11:55 the next day I'm pacing around the block of the restaurant cursing myself because I feel like I'm going to puke the two and a half bottles of two buck Chuck from the night before all over my dusty suit. I take a deep breath and go in and sit down with the owner and his project manager for the renovation. These guys just got their liquor license, a priceless treasure in this town, and need someone who knows how to run a bar. I start into the standard cheesy up talking and eye contact and all the other silly things they tell you to do in interviews. Fifteen minutes in and I can see that I'm losing them. These guys just finished interviewing a hundred and fifty other assholes just like me and they don't want to hear my canned little speech. I need to just whip my balls out and slap em on the table. I stop mid sentence, take a sip of water and say "Listen. I'm gonna be frank." and proceed to tear down their entire business model and tell them how they're doing everything wrong. For forty five minutes I tell them the food sucks, the layout is all wrong, they have no marketing, everything. At the end of it all I half expect them to toss me right out on the street but low and behold they start drilling me with questions about how they can rebuild all the hopes and dreams I just shattered. When all is said and done they shake my hand and say that they'll give me a call. Well, it was worth a try. I walk home and peel down to my underpants and lay on the couch and smoke a dozen cigarettes staring at the ceiling for an hour. Then my phone rings. It's the owner, he wants me to come in tomorrow to make me an offer. Holy mother of poo poo it worked. The next day he sits me down and listens to everything I have to say. A laundry list of changes I came up with the night before and he wants them all. He tells me that if I can increase their profits by roughly fifty percent in the next three months that he'll offer me a profit share and eventually a partnership in the business. He even says that if I'm interested he may even be willing to sell me the place in a couple years. Time to put my money where my mouth is. Today was my first day and starting at 8:30 am I began completely rearranging the place between meetings with my reps, employees, and other managers, all while doing battle with a mountain of ever growing paperwork. The evening approaches and while we had a bit of a lunch rush the place is completely empty now. The night shift servers forlornly look around and do busy work and explain that we'll be lucky if we get two or three tables all night. The problem is that the entire front wall of the place is floor to ceiling windows and all the foot traffic can see that the place is dead. It's a Catch 22 in that the only way to get people in here is to get people in here. The head server asks if we can close early and I tell him to wait, I have an idea. I take out my phone and call a bunch of my old bartenders from my last job. I tell them about my new gig and that I need some people to drink some free beer and if they help me that there'll be a job in it for them. In the grand scheme of things I've asked them to do worse. They quickly arrive and start putting away beers and Jacobs Ladders and before you know it the customers start coming in. It begins as a trickle and soon becomes a steady pour. It's worked and the staff has never seen a rush like this but they kick rear end despite having worked here for little more than minimum wage up until now. When all is said and done the night went great. The customers loved the place and the employees whom had all looked at me at the beginning of the day like another in a long line of stooge managers were now smiling and patting me on the back. I retire to my office and go over the sales reports. In just one day I've met my quota by just two dollars and sixty eight cents. One down, eighty nine to go.
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Nov 15, 2012 00:40
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Tips on Barbacking By Tom Rakewell Bartenders have a wide range of expectations and quirks that can make this answer vary, but there are definitely a few things any volume bartender can agree on, one of them being that nothing pisses us off more than having to split tips with useless support staff. But basically a few big things are: 1. Do your job. This should be obvious, but the way most barbacks work, it really isn't. Clean the bar, wash glasses and restock them as soon as possible, and be on top of any and all sidework or backup work that needs doing. In an ideal high volume world, the bartender should be doing nothing but taking orders, making drinks, and managing tabs. Anything else is a distraction that disrupts potential sales. 2. Anticipate. This sets the great barbacks apart from the good ones. Keep an eye on tasks that may come up soon, and knock them out before they become an issue. If you see garnish trays running low with no backup fruit in the cooler, start cutting the minute you have time. If you see that Grey Goose bottle in well 3 about to run dry, then grab a new one, cut the foil off, and have it prepped to open and replace the empty. If the trash can is getting close to full, empty it before it overflows. Things like these not only help out by saving labor, they prevent delays from occurring and demonstrate a constant awareness of ones surroundings, a crucial skill for bartenders. 3. Don't get in the way. A barback's job is to make service more efficient, not to slow it down. For example, one of the barbacks at my current restaurant has this extremely annoying habit of constantly prepping ice water glasses at the service well, which blocks me from making waitress tickets efficiently. Recognize the high traffic areas behind the bar and avoid them unless absolutely necessary, or at least time it so you can knock out your tasks without disrupting the bartender. Learn to move quickly and efficiently and weave through traffic so you can get your poo poo done without crashing into people as you go. 4. Don't try to bartend. Some bartenders may be ok with it, and some may even encourage you to do it. But unless given the ok, you're going to piss off bartenders fast if you try to do their job for them. My number one pet peeve is when barbacks interrupt me while I'm taking care of customers (I'm talking about actually conducting business, not just sitting around flirting with the same girl for 20 minutes in a busy bar) and demand that I drop everything to attend to another person. It's rude, looks sloppy, forces the bartender to make a choice that's going to piss off the losing customer, and throws off whatever mental list of the bar the bartender has running in his head. If you're barbacking in a situation where the bartender is overwhelmed and not just oblivious, then you can either get a manager to help bartend, cool off the customer by telling him the bartender is getting to him, or wait for the nearest down moment to whisper any news of the situation. Running and pulling the bartender away midservice or, even worse, waiting on the customer, loving up either the order, drink, or payment process and requiring the bartender's help to fix it is about as annoying a thing as a barback can do during a slammed shift. Generally, the metric for a barback's performance is, "Was it worth paying him to do to this work, or could I have just as easily done his job myself and saved the money?" If you're in a slow place, you may inherently piss off the barstaff by eating tips when your workload really isn't significant enough to require you. But as long as it's busy enough to make your presence worthwhile, and you're getting poo poo done and speeding up service without getting in the barstaff's way, you should be just fine. By nrr Speed is your best friend. Treat your shift like a cardio workout, and it's going to be tough for anyone to badmouth you. I can't stress that enough. Even if you suck at everything else, if you're busting your rear end to get things done and running around the place all night long, people will notice. Most of the job requires working magic by doing a million things at once, and while you're working out just how the gently caress you're going to manage that, just running your rear end off all night long is the best substitute for actually being a wizard. Anticipating what each bartender is going to need throughout the night and having a fresh one ready as they're finishing one off is also going to keep you ahead of the game and make you look like a rockstar. This goes not only for stock, but for glassware, condiments, ice, clean cloths, etc etc. If you give a bartender what he needs before he has to ask for it, you're doing a good job. If you give it to him before he even knows he needs it, you rule. As well as keeping an eye on what your bartender is using during the night, also try and keep an eye on what customers are doing as well. If you're behind the bar and notice a big group ordering a round of Jager Bombs that your bartender is going to do domino style (and make a big rear end mess with so he can get a bigger tip,) hang around and be on top of cleaning that up and make sure you restock any shot glasses. Keep an eye out for large groups all the time, and if you can, be around the bar when they're ordering so you can fill whatever holes they create. It's kind of frustrating when a busser/barback sees you pour a huge round of shots and buggers off only to have the same group turn around and order another big rear end round... and another one, and all of a sudden you're standing around with your dick in your hand looking like a dumbass cos you're out of shot glasses Also if you've got different sections as barbacks and you're assigned to different sections/bartenders... steal poo poo. We've got a front and a back bar, generally with a barback assigned to each and I'll always give my barback some extra cash if the bar's almost completely out of something and he busts his rear end to make sure I've got what's left. Even more if i know he screwed over one of the other bartenders to make sure I've got it. Bartenders love being dicks to each other, and if you can't exploit that rivalry and profit from it, then you're working with a bunch of pussies. Move as fast as you can behind the bar without ever being in the way. You're the bottom of the food chain, so unfortunately you pretty much never have the right of way. Bumping into poo poo is just part of working behind a bar, but it can get pretty frustrating pretty quickly if the new guy is constantly in your way or bumping into you. Use your peripherals and try to be constantly aware of what's going on 360 degrees around you so you can anticipate what moves people to the side, or even behind you are about to make. This is more of a sixth sense type thing that you will pick up over time, but is one of the most important skills you can develop. It'll also help when you have to book it through the middle of a crowd of hundreds of people with cases of beer and a bucket of ice to restock a satelite bar or beer pit. Being vocal about what you're doing can really help out as well. A simple "behind" or "coming under" to let people know what you're doing when you're coming into their space can be a lifesaver and can save you wearing a couple of drinks or copping a bottle in the back of the head while you're restocking fridges. And the last thing I can think of is keep the bar clean as you can. When we're in the weeds and serving 3 or 4 people at a time, it can be tough to keep the bar clean and dry as well as pour booze for dozens of thirsty douchebags. Also keeping an eye out for the big money spenders and paying extra special attention to their tables can really make you look good as well. If you see someone throwing some money around, taking care of their table might even get you a tip from them, but if not the chances are that they're going to continue being generous when they're going to the bar. If I know my barbacks have been taking good care of my best customers, I always take it into account when I'm tipping out at the end of the night. Some of this stuff will be easy to pick up straight away, some of it will take time, but honestly, being enthusiastic and having a sense of urgency in everything you do will make you stand out until you get these skills under your belt and are able to string them all together at the same time. Being that you already want to be the best damned barback ever pretty much puts you ahead of the game, so good luck cos the world needs more kickass barbacks. James Woods fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Nov 15, 2012 |
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Nov 15, 2012 00:43
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The Bartending FAQ This FAQ is designed to help people interested in getting into the fun, exciting, and STD ridden world of bartending. This guide will help you with the steps necessary to not only get but keep a bartending job. Any other bartenders out there who think I may have omitted something please feel free to chime in and I’ll edit the FAQ. Should I go to bartending school? No. Bartending schools are money eating scams and while they teach you drink recipes they don’t provide you with any real experience. They’ll advertise job placement services but any bar worth working at will have a constant influx of resumes and wouldn’t need to solicit such a service. Many bars even have a policy of not hiring bartending school graduates. If you’ve already graduated, don’t put it on your resume. OK, so if I don’t go to bartending school how do I learn? Nothing can substitute hands on experience and your first busy shift will be very stressful no matter how much you prepare. Get a copy of “The Bartenders Black Book” and read it cover to cover. It’s set up like a textbook for bartending and is very informative. Another good resource is http://www.webtender.com . They have a searchable database for drink recipes and a lot of useful information from bartenders from all over the world. Exactly what drinks do I need to know how to make to start off with? Here is a list that I make all my new bartenders memorize. Call Drinks (Vodka Soda, Rum and Coke, whatever) Cosmopolitan Lemon Drop Kamikaze Rickey Gimlet Margarita Tequila Sunrise Manhattan Tom Collins Sea Breeze Bay Breeze Cape Cod Screwdriver Martini (and all common variations) White Russian Irish Coffee Press This is a basic list and doesn’t include shots or cordials. Once you start working at a bar you’ll get a feel for what shots are popular and can memorize them then. Is there any other knowledge I should have? A good bartender should have a broad understanding of wine, spirits, and beer and the processes by which they are made. The book I suggested above is a good place to start but you should always be trying to increase your knowledge base. Any local library should have many books on the subject. How can I practice before I get a job? Get yourself a shaker (the kind with a steel sleeve and a glass pint) and some pour spouts and practice pouring at home. A lot of bartending is muscle memory and the sooner you practice the sooner you’ll get the hang of it and look competent in an interview. Practice pouring singles and doubles in one and two oz. shot glasses. You should also practice shaking with ice to the point you can just look at a glass and know the proper amount of shaking and pouring to fill it to the brim with nothing leftover. Once you’ve mastered this practice doing multiple drinks in one shaker. Should I learn flair? I wouldn’t worry too much about flair at first as you already have a lot to study and practice. Further down the line you can start messing around with simple bottle flair with an old bottle wrapped in electrical tape and a jigger and about ten oz. of water in it. Flair will get you tips and is a valuable tool later on. I have no experience, what should my resume include? Bullshit. Even I lied my rear end off to get my first gig and I’m sure many others did too. Put down bars in other cities/states, bars that went out of business, or even a bar where you know someone who works there that will vouch for you. I hire bartenders all the time and I rarely if ever check references. Where should I drop resumes? Anywhere and everywhere that serves drinks. In all honesty this process can take weeks and even months until you get a bite. Chain restaurants tend to only promote bartenders from within their serving staff and should be avoided. A lot of times it comes down to getting lucky and finding a place that just lost someone. When you drop off a resume insist on handing it directly to the manager and get contact info to set up an interview. If you hand your resume to a bartender its likely to end up in the trash. Any advise on the interview? To start off with you should approach this like any other interview and act appropriately. Be prepared to have to make drinks on the spot, I make all interviewees pour a single and a double before I even shake their hand. Use of restaurant lingo can aid in the illusion that you have previous experience. Such terms include; “In The Weeds” – Having non stop drink orders, “POS” – Point of Sale as in your computerized register. Try if you can to familiarize yourself with common systems like MICROS and Open Table, “Back of House/Front of House” – referring to servers/bartenders = FOH and cooks/housemen = BOH, “Knowledge Base” – Your familiarity with cocktails and drinks in general. What kind of money can I expect? This varies state by state and city by city. When I worked in Denver I made $2.50/hr plus tips. Here in San Francisco even service employees get minimum wage which is around $9.00 an hour plus tips. Tips on a good shift are usually at least $100 a night. The most I’ve ever made was over $800 on a five hour shift. Expect a work week of two to four shifts per week at about five to eight hours each. These figures can vary greatly depending on the bar you work at but should give you a baseline for what to expect. What about drinking on the job? As a manager I have to tell my people that it’s a fire-able offense. In reality I’ll allow it in moderation as long as customers don’t see it and you can function in respect to doing your job. Any advise on cutting people off/86ing them? It can and will happen. When you cut someone off you have to do it politely and try and make it seem as if it was your boss putting pressure on you. Now that I am the boss I don’t have that luxury and sometimes things get heated. As for 86ing people, if you don’t have bouncers this will likely fall into your jurisdiction and can be a mess. The short and sweet of it is that you should learn an arm lock or restraint hold and just get them on the sidewalk as soon as possible if they resist. Feel free to rough em up a bit, the cops will always side with you. Is carding important? Oh Christ yes. If your bar gets busted by ABC (Alcohol Beverage Control) on your watch you’ll likely get fired. Some businesses will make you personally liable for the fines imposed. I’m a hot girl with big boobs and no experience, how do I get a job? You don’t need my help. Some bars have an off the books policy of not hiring male bartenders and while this is illegal, you have to accept that it comes with the territory.
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Nov 15, 2012 00:47
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Sheep-Goats posted:Are Scottish people mad that the apostrophe is in such an inconvenient place on the keyboard? I'm guessing American keyboards are different, I don't find it awkward at all.
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Nov 15, 2012 13:33
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| # ? May 15, 2024 17:58 |
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Me and my entire staff are going to be in Vegas at the end of January for a much needed and deserved vacation. Do we have any Vegas bartenders in here anymore?
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Nov 20, 2012 10:21
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